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If you want to know what human beings are doing on this planet, sometimes you have to take to the skies and look down, godlike, on the landscape. It puts humans and our endeavours into the proper perspective. This is what Alex Maclean has been doing since the early seventies.

I have just returned from Aerial Perspectives at the Beetles and Huxley gallery in Central London and I got to see a few dozen of his amazing pictures and hear him talk about them.

He flies solo mostly and takes the pictures through the window of his small plane at around 1,000 feet. The pictures show trains, beaches, housing developments, semi-dismantled bombers, water parks and the rest. Some of the pictures have an unreal quality - something like a model village.